Sensors of this type are widely used today to be incorporated in home appliances, electronic products, and other various products and devices to detect a tilt or a vibration of the products and devices instead of mercury sensors, which use mercury, a harmful substance, as a movable electrode, but recently, as the devices in which the sensors are used are continuously downsized and the demands to mount the sensors into high-tech electronics of a compact size, such as digital camera and cell phone, have drastically increased, the level of the market demand for more downsizing, higher property, higher reliability is increasingly growing.
As the tilt and vibration sensors of this type, those that have a sensor case and a plurality of elongated metal lead frames projected out of the sensor case have been conventionally used as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 10-12107 and 11-195359 for example.
However, in the tilt and vibration sensors having metal lead frames, generally, because a plurality of metal electrode plates are arranged in a hollow portion of the case and a plurality of fasteners, such as metal connectors, are required for fixing the metal lead frames to the case, a significant downsizing of the outer dimension of the whole sensor is difficult to achieve, which makes it impossible to mount the sensor to a printed circuit board by automatic soldering that uses surface mount technology (SMT) as a high density packaging technology of compact electronic components, and the sensor had to be mounted to a printed circuit board using approaches such as a so-called lead through mounting in which a plurality of lead through holes are formed in a printed circuit board and the metal leads are individually inserted through the through holes to be soldered.
The downsizing of a tilt detecting sensor requires a downsizing of a sensor case, and as a result, a compact sensor has been proposed in which a case body and/or a lid is molded into a size as small as possible using a thermoplastic synthetic resin having a relatively high heat resistance, and joining terminals that can be directly soldered to a printed circuit board using surface mount technology are arranged to be projected out of a sensor case, and the sensor case has an outer dimension as an approximately 5 mm cube.